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Avira AntiVir Personal - Free Antivirus has earned a rightful place among the effective free protection solutions for desktops, laptops and notebooks alike. Over the years, the antivirus technology utilized by this program has been updated, upgraded and constantly developed so the protection offered by it is extremely solid.

Moreover, Avira is one of the anti-malware utilities that receive frequent database updates. Therefore, users can rest assured that their computer will never fall prey to the newest developed Trojans, worms or viruses. This version also adds some major fixes and improvements, about which readers will discover shortly.

Installation

If there is one negative aspect worth mentioning about Avira AntiVir Personal, then it would have to be the installation process. This has nothing to do with the size, duration or complexity of the procedure, but rather with the bundle of ads, banners, browser toolbars and the fact that you can easily modify the default SE if you are not careful.

However, paying attention during the installation process and un-checking the boxes associated with the unnecessary software will allow you to perform a clean installation of the antivirus program. The original size (prior to the update) of Avira AntiVir Personal is 83MB and running the program under the Vista or 7 versions of Windows requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM on your machine. For XP, 2000 or older versions, the minimum RAM requirement is 192MB. Regardless of the OS, Avira needs 100MB or more (Quarantine function) of free space on the drive where it is installed.

Interface

The interface of Avira AntiVir Personal is perhaps one of the most appreciated aspects of the utility, because it is clean, simple to understand and it provides all the controls that will ever be required to operate the program, alter its scan specifications, modify the protection features and more. Each feature can be accessed from the main category interface and will open up a new window with all the associated commands (Status, Scanner, Guard, Quarantine, Scheduling, Reports).

Pros

Avira AntiVir Personal has, even in the free version, proved to be an incredibly powerful tool against viruses, worms, Trojans, dialers (special AntiDialer feature included in this version) and rootkits (AntiRootkit feature). In addition, this program is an invaluable protection against phishing, spyware or adware and it also incorporates support for Netbooks with low resolutions. At the same time, the developers have focused their efforts on creating an antivirus protection program that can withstand the targeted attacks of various malicious programs (Avira functions with several missing registry keys or deleted components, not to mention that its processes are less prone to forceful termination). Moreover, this version has significantly limited resource usage and has improved scanning speeds by up to 20 percent.

Cons

The nag screen could be eliminated, considering the slightly limited capabilities of the freeware version.